The next time I ran into Alex Tew after our evening at the Gardening Club, he actually ran in to me.

More accurately, he ran across a crowded nightclub and jumped on my back.

I had been invited to a party for ‘Imperial Entrepreneurs’, a group of young business people, particularly technology entrepreneurs, who attend Imperial College in London. It’s hard to imagine a group more geeky than young technology entrepreneurs from Imperial College and so it’s not entirely surprising that the crowd was 99.9 per cent male and – um – conservatively dressed. I swear you’ve never seen so many checked shirts in your life. This wouldn’t have been a problem had the organisers not decided to host the event in the basement of Paper, the sickeningly hip nightclub underneath the Cafe Royale, just off Regent Street.

The cool venue was the only reason I’d accepted the invitation so readily: the club has a reputation for attracting astonishingly attractive and wealthy women – quite unobtainable, of course (and a gold-digging nightmare if you were successful) – but very nice to look at and great fun to flirt with at the bar.

The event was due to kick off at nine and by the time I arrived, just before eleven, a queue of checked shirts had formed, snaking halfway down the street. It didn’t seem to be moving. I noticed the organiser standing towards the front of the queue – even he was queuing. That wasn’t a good sign.

I wandered up to find out what was going on.

‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

‘They’re not letting anyone in.’

‘But I thought you’d booked the whole floor for the party?’

‘We have, but the bouncers say they want to keep the balance of men and women about the same through the whole club.’

‘But that’s stupid. This is an event for Internet entrepreneurs – there’ll be about ten women here in total if you’re lucky.’

Even that was optimistic. Internet networking events are so legendary for their awful women-to-men ratio that in San Francisco they’ve been nicknamed ’sausage fests’.

‘Yeah, but what can you do?’

‘Why don’t you find a girl?’ I suggested.

‘Why?’

Clearly this wasn’t going to be easy.

‘Look, hang on, ‘ I said, pulling out my phone. There was only one thing to do: I called my friend Kate who lives a five-minute walk from Regent Street. Kate works in television and in the two or three years I’d known her she’d become used to getting phone calls from me at all hours of the day and night inviting her to come and crash parties with me. Having agreed early on in our friendship that there was no way she’d be stupid enough to sleep with me, and after I’d exhausted all my efforts to convince her otherwise, she had become the ultimate friend date. She had also become my unofficial PR rep, hyping me to her attractive female friends and assuring them that – for the right woman – I’d be a great catch.

‘Carr! What can I do for you this evening?’

‘Hello, darling, ‘ I said. ‘I don’t want anything. I was just calling to see how you are. It’s come to something when a fellow can’t call his friend of an evening to see how she is.’

Silence.

‘Okay, okay. I need a favour. Can you put on something sexy and come to Paper on Regent Street?’

‘What? No. I’m watching CSI: NY and they’re about to start cutting open the body. And, anyway, what are you doing at Paper? It’s awful. All fake tits and permatans.’

Duh, I thought, that’s why I’m here.

‘I know, I know. But this is an emergency. I need you to be my sexy date to this geek party thing. They’re not letting men in on their own.’

‘And so you want me to be your plus one? To some sausage fest geek party?’

‘Yes. Please.’

‘Sorry, got to go, they’re using the special electric brain saw.’ *Click*

Clearly Kate wasn’t going to be any help. Just wait till she phoned me in the middle of the night asking me to be her plus one to a party full of sex-starved women. I’d show her.

Just then I noticed three extremely glamorous-looking girls – all fake tits and permatans – tottering towards the front of the queue in the confident way beautiful girls who know they’re going to get waved through velvet ropes do.

Fuck it. Nothing ventured…

‘Excuse me, ‘ I said, trying to act as nonchalantly as possible, as if approaching footballers’ wives was something I did every day.

They looked at me through their four layers of mascara, and then looked at the other two hundred geeky men standing in the queue next to me. I swore one of them was about to Mace me.

‘Yeah?’

‘I know this is really cheeky…’ I leaned in, conspiratorially. The smell of perfume was unbearable; Mace would have been blessed relief… ‘but I’ve been forced to go to this party with all these nerdy guys. It’s for work. I’m a journalist, you see…’

I tried to keep my voice down. If my plan was going to succeed, there was no way the girls could think I was there voluntarily. That I was one of these people.

‘…and they’re only letting one man in with every girl.’

‘So?’

‘So, would you mind awfully if I tagged along with you ladies, just till we get through the door?’

They looked at me with a mixture of pity and fear.

‘I’ll buy you all a drink, if you do. Please, it would really help me out.’

(Little-boy-lost face. Never fails.)

‘Okay. But we’re drinking champagne, ‘ they cackled as one. It was terrifying, but it had worked.

Once inside, and having spent nearly £25 buying three drinks – £25! – I looked around the room. Sitting on a huge banquette were a dozen or so of the prettiest girls you’ve ever seen, wearing the shortest skirts. Scary beautiful – the type of women who can only be models or high-class hookers. It was like they were auditioning extras for Anne Summers: The Movie . And they were all tall. So very, very tall.

And also this. Terrified.

They had clearly turned up at their usual haunt, expecting it to be full of the usual crowd of Premiership footballers and boy band members. But, instead, their territory had been overrun by a hundred or so young technology entrepreneurs, most of them still students, ferociously networking with each other and barely giving the women a second glance. Which was probably absolutely fine by them.

It was at this point that I was assaulted by a drunk millionaire who ran across the room and jumped on my back.

‘Paul Carr!’ Alex Tew shouted, nearly knocking me off my feet. ‘Thank God you’re here. You got past the bouncers then? Man, I fucking love it when I see you at parties – I know we’re not going to stop until the next morning.’

I was flattered, even though he was essentially calling me an alcoholic who didn’t know when to call it a night. I was delighted to see him, too – someone human, and fun, at an otherwise potentially horrific party.

‘So, how’s it all going?’ I asked.

‘Great! I’m about to announce my next project. It’s going to be even bigger than The Million Dollar Homepage.’

‘Let me guess, ‘ I joked, ‘The “Two Million Dollar Homepage”?’

‘Funny you should say that… Come on, let’s get a drink…’

6.1

Turns out that Alex ’s big new idea was, essentially, The Two Million Dollar Homepage – but with a twist. Called Pixelotto, the new site would again allow advertisers to buy one of a million squares on a giant web page. But this time, instead of each square costing a dollar, they would cost two dollars – one dollar of which went to Alex and the other into a prize fund. Every time a visitor to the site clicked on a square, he would be entered into a prize draw to win the entire fund. It was, once again, beautifully simple – users were encouraged to click more often by the promise of a huge prize, giving advertisers a better return for their squares and Alex even more advertising bucks as a result.

Given how many people clicked on the ads on the original Million Dollar Homepage – the site is littered with testimonials from satisfied customers – it’s hard to see how Pixelotto could possibly fail. And, indeed, Alex boasted, lastminute.com, the online travel company specialising in late deals, had already agreed to buy the block of squares right in the middle of the site. He was making money before the damn thing had even launched. Money for nothing – just a concept. Now that’s being an entrepreneur.

Dr Linus Pauling, the great American theoretical chemist, once said, ‘The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas, and throw the bad ones away.’ If Alex Tew is anything to go by, Pauling was bang on the money.

A short time later, at yet another networking event, I decided to ask Alex what his secret was to knowing whether a business idea was good or bad. The Million Dollar Homepage had spawned hundred of imitators, making it that Holy Grail of inventions: one that not only launches a new business but an entire new format. I wanted to know his secret so that I could apply it to Fridaycities.

‘ There’s no secret to having good ideas.’

‘Thanks, Alex. That’s a lot of help.’

‘Seriously – there isn’t. What I do is get a notepad and write a list

of every idea I can think of that might make money. That ’s the first criterion – can it make money? If not, it’s a waste of time. Then, when I’ve got my list, the difficult part starts – choosing which idea to follow. Which one has the best chance of succeeding for the greatest possible reward? When I did The Million Dollar Homepage I had a list of, like, ten ideas that might work. The Homepage was the best of them. And it worked.’

I couldn ‘t argue with that.

‘You know, ‘ I said, ‘that party we went to with all those people in checked shirts gave me a great idea for you: next time there’s a geek party, you should offer to sponsor all of the shirts – you could sell each check for £10 to an advertiser and split the money with the nerds. Call it “the thousand check shirt party”.’

‘Yeah,’ he dead-panned, ‘that’s a good example of an idea that wouldn’t make it off the page.’

Fuck it, it was worth a shot.

6.2

It ’s actually not at all surprising that I’d run into Alex at Paper or that Michael Smith happened to be in the same building as us or even that, a few weeks later, another acquaintance of ours, Michael O’Shea – founder of kids’ toy site Wickeduncle.com, * took a desk opposite ours at Battersea Studios.

The thing you need to know about the London Internet scene (and it is a scene) is that it’s absolutely tiny. And it’s made to feel even tinier by the number of connections there are between the major players. There can be very few sectors of the media where at any given party or networking event you’ll find almost all of the key players in the same room. At an Internet event, one bad tray of hors d’oeuvres could wipe out the entire industry.

And, boy, are there a lot of events. In London alone, in any given week, there are at least half a dozen – ranging from sensible breakfast gatherings to Bacchanalian late-night parties where ‘getting to know your peers’ is meant as much in the biblical as the commercial sense.

Whichever type of event you choose to attend, if you want to succeed as an Internet entrepreneur then being part of the ’scene’ is a must. The more networking you do, the more likely you are to meet the guy who invested in the guy who got bought by the guy who will become the guy who gives you $10 million to start your business. I knew that if I was to have a hope in hell of succeeding with Fridaycities I was going to have to spend a lot of time networking, and so I decided to attend as many of these events as possible. It was a tough job, but I was prepared to make the sacrifice.

The first event I went to after moving into the new office was one of the most grown-up examples of the genre. If the London Internet scene is a tight network then Saul Klein is right smack bang in the middle of it. A venture capitalist by trade, he has invested in a whole host of successful dot com companies, including Michael’s Mind Candy, and is also on the board of directors of Skype. If you’re trying to raise money for a company in London, he’s a very useful person to know. And there are few better ways to get to know him than by turning up at his weekly morning networking event: Open Coffee.

Open Coffee is a strange beast, basically an impromptu coffee morning for entrepreneurs and investors. Every week, between the hours of ten and noon, a certain central London coffee shop suddenly starts filling up with men and women in smart suits with laptop bags slung over their shoulders. It happens slowly at first, almost imperceptibly, but by 10.30 it’s unmistakable. For a start, everyone in the shop is standing up, walking around, working the room. Any normal customers who stray in suddenly find themselves having a business card thrust in their faces, or their tables being overrun by laptops. At the very centre of this madness are the venture capitalists, Saul and his colleagues from London’s various investment houses all standing, like cheerleaders at the prom, fending off approaches from would-be suitors. In truth, very little business is talked at Open Coffee; instead, it’s all about making introductions. The best most entrepreneurs can hope for is a quick shake of a royal hand, a thirty-second explanation as to why your business is going to change the world and, if you’re lucky, an exchange of business cards and the promise of a follow-up which may or may not come. And then it’s back to the outer orbits, to spend the rest of the morning talking to other entrepreneurs and trying to pretend you’re far more successful than they are.

And so it was that, despite not being by nature a morning person, I stumbled, bleary-eyed into a Starbucks somewhere near Oxford Street. I’d dragged Savannah along with me too on the basis that a) she was much better at mornings than I was so she’d ensure I got there on time, b) she’s much prettier than me, so increased our chances of getting attention from the assembled male investors by about a million per cent, and c) if we couldn’t find anyone to talk to, we could always talk to each other.

After ordering a couple of tall, wet, skinny lattes, or something equally preposterous, we began to ‘work’ the room, which was already ridiculously crowded. In a far corner, I spotted Saul who was talking to another extremely important person, Danny Rimer.

‘Don’t look, but the dream team is standing over there, ‘ I whispered to Savannah.

‘Where?’ she shouted back, over the deafening networking gaggle.

‘In that corner. Those two.’ I nodded with my head. ‘Don’t look!’

‘The geeks?’ Savannah shouted, louder this time. To Savannah, anyone involved in the web industry was a geek. This, despite the fact that, of course, she herself was now involved in the web industry.

‘Shhhhhh. They’re not geeks – that’s Saul Klein and the guy he’s talking to is Danny Rimer. Danny works for Index Ventures and invested in – well – everybody. Skype, Joost, MySp… Jesus, he was like thirty-fifth in Forbes ‘ list of the most powerful people in technology deal-making.* He is a Fucking Big Deal.’

‘Well, he looks like a geek.’

‘He does look a bit like a geek, ‘ I conceded.

‘I probably shouldn’t mention that to him?’ she asked.

‘Probably not, no.’

But, frankly, at this stage the chances of getting near enough to either of them to say anything were looking extraordinarily slim. Between us were about a hundred hungry entrepreneurs. We needed some kind of secret weapon. And fortunately, at that moment, one walked up behind me.

‘Paul!’ I felt a huge hand on my shoulder. It could only be one person. Robert Loch.

‘Robert!’ I shrieked with a mixture of surprise and relief. Robert -more about him later – had mentioned a few weeks earlier that he knew Danny and had offered to arrange an introduction should I ever need one. Boy, did I need one.

‘ No problem…’ he said, and off we marched through the crowd, scattering entrepreneurs left and right as we went. Robert is well over six foot, which is an incredible advantage if you want to get from one side of a crowded room to the other.

‘Saul, I want you to meet Paul and Savannah, ‘ he said, not even waiting for the two men to finish their conversation. ‘They’re looking for funding for their new company, Fridaycities. They’re a really good team, and their business is very interesting. But all you really need to know is that – like all the best teams – Paul is the funny one and Savannah is the pretty one.’

Yeah, thanks, Rob – exactly the right level of professionalism. We had been aiming for platonic power couple, but we’d suddenly become one of those hot wife/funny husband couples you get in American sitcoms. Still, it was an in and we managed to blurt out a few sentences explaining Fridaycities and why it was going to change the world. Rimer, to his credit, pretended to give a fuck – even going so far as to suggest that we should hook up a meeting when we had a proper presentation to show him. We had our business card swap and we were away. Not a total disaster, but hardly a resounding success. But, then again, I’m not a morning person.

6.3

After my lukewarm success at Open Coffee, I ‘d decided to redirect my networking efforts to the evening events and parties: not only am I very much a night person but evening events also had the twin benefits of informality and alcohol, which is always a good thing to have around when you’re trying to win new friends and influence people.

Saul Klein very rarely attended late-night events – and rumour had it that he didn’t approve of the organisers of these often hedonistic parties, believing that they fuelled media cliches of young, drunk entrepreneurs partying their way into a second bubble. The party organisers, for their part, believed exactly the opposite – that a critical element of any industry, particularly a media-related one, was its social scene. In all other areas of the media, much of the real business was done on the party circuit, with people making new hires based on people they’d met socially, not during a sober early morning introduction at Starbucks.

The truth was probably somewhere between the two – yes, the evening parties were often attended by journalists, who liked to go back and report that the Internet sector was ‘partying like it’s 1999′ (natch) but there was also no denying that late-night events tended to attract a far higher calibre of attendee – successful entrepreneurs and investors who weren’t there to network, but just to have a good time. It was when they were off duty that they were at their most approachable.
And so when, a couple of weeks later, Robert Loch called me with his news, his timing couldn’t have been better.

6.4

‘Mate, guess where I am.’

When Robert phones you asking that question, it ’s generally unwise to try to guess. Imagine Prince Philip calling you up and asking ‘guess who I’ve just offended’. Life’s too short to list all the various possibilities.

‘ I have no idea. It’s not even noon, so presumably you’re in bed.’ ‘No… Guess again…’

I first met Robert when he was co-founder and ‘product architect’ at a business networking website called So flow. Imagine a kind of Facebook for business people, but with significantly fewer users, and you’ve basically got Soflow. The company’s main investor was Martin Clifford, an entrepreneur who sold his first business – a dating site called uDate – for $150 million in 2003. While most dot com entrepreneurs preferred to base their operations in Silicon Valley, or San Francisco, or London, Clifford opted to run Soflow from his villa in Barbados. In what was certainly the sweetest corporate retreat of all time, Robert and the rest of the Soflow team spent their time shuttling back and forth to the Caribbean for strategy meetings held in Clifford’s outdoor swimming pool. Despite the site’s relatively small user base and heavy competition from rival services like LinkedIn.com, Soflow was determined to use its diminutive size to its advantage – focusing on entrepreneurs rather than trying to reach all business people. On the Internet, niche sites work.

Unless they don’t.

Soflow didn’t, despite raising $5 million in funding. Robert left the company in 2006 and Soflow.com limped on for a few more months before being re-branded and re-launched as Wis.dm (yuck), a site that allowed users to answer simple yes and no questions such as ‘Do you wonder why men would be attracted to mermaids when it would be impossible to have sex with them?’ and ‘Have you ever taken a folding chair on to an elevator?’* Of course, with its new highbrow focus and audience of brain surgeons and rocket scientists, Wis.dm took off like a rocket.

Meanwhile, realising that there ’s more fun to be had helping other people raise money than doing it yourself, Robert set up a new company -’Internet People’- that would bring together entrepreneurs and investors through ‘informal networking events’. And by ‘informal networking events’ what I mean is that Robert very quickly got a reputation for organising the best parties in the dot com world.

Let me be clear here: we ‘re talking killer parties – both in the sense that a lot of entrepreneurs would kill to be there, and also because there’s always a slight risk that someone would end up dead before the end. Robert’s were parties that you’d fly in from Barbados to attend.

The formula for Internet People was simple: find a killer venue, fill it with top people in the industry, choose an interesting theme and then mix in some young, female models to taste. No sausage fests, these events. Robert had befriended a group of South American models who, in exchange for some drinks, would happily dress up in tiny outfits and mingle with his party goers.

So, when it comes to knowing how to throw a good party, Robert is no slouch. But even by his standards, the news he was calling to give me that morning was unbelievable.

‘Okay, I give up. Where are you?’

‘I’m just on my way to pick up the keys to Mr Rong’s.’ ‘

‘That’s great!’ I replied. ‘No. Wait. Hang on. Who is Mr Wrong? Do I want to know? ‘

‘It’s spelt R-o-n-g-s, without the W. It’s our new club.’ ‘We have a new club?’

‘Yes, it’s in Soho, near Chinatown. So we’re calling it Mr Rong’s.”

‘Hang on. We?’

‘Yeah. You’re one of the founding members. It’s going to be a club for Internet people to hang out in. Network. Get drunk. That kind of thing. Like Adam Street, but it’s ours. It’s me, you…’ he rattled off a list of perhaps a dozen more entrepreneurs, ‘and of course the Brazilian girls and their friends have been given free membership.’

My alarm clock went off. Noon. I sat up in bed.

‘Er, Rob. Couple of things… when did you decide to buy a club? And how the fuck are you going to afford it? No – more to the point, how the fuck am I going to afford to join? Oh, and… did you say it’s in Chinatown?’

‘Yep.’

‘Okay, well, ignore all my other questions – you do realise you’re going to be cut into tiny pieces by triads? You don’t just open a drinking den in the middle of Chinatown.’

‘We’ll it’s not exactly Chinatown, it’s Soho; the Chinatown end of Soho. And it’s not a drinking den. It’s a networking venue. With drinking. And don’t worry about the cost; I’ve got it covered. You just have to bring booze when there’s an event on. It’s got three floors, with a dance floor and a bar. Oh, and two hot tubs.’

Much as I was trying to be the voice of reason, this was fucking amazing news. Robert and I had first talked about the idea of a members’ club for entrepreneurs – and other social outcasts – the previous Halloween. We were pretty drunk and, if I remember correctly, at least one of us was dressed as a zombie and drinking a very strong White Russian. Or possibly the other way around.

The plan would be to rent a huge loft space somewhere in the centre of town and split the rent between a dozen of us. Technically it would be a residential flat – to avoid tricky licensing issues – but it would host Internet People events and would also be available to ‘borrow’ for other events, for a fee. In our fantasy world there would also be bedrooms to avoid having to get the last tube home – and (we joked) a hot tub, creating a much more honest environment for the real purpose of these kinds of events: making the organisers rich or getting them laid. Preferably both. We were going to call it ‘The End Game’, at my suggestion, because of our theory that money, drinking and sex were, basically, the end game for the entrepreneur.

Of course, to the rest of us The End Game was just a drunken joke. A projection of our Playboy delusions of combining business with decadent pleasure. But one of the great things about Robert, like so many Internet people, is that he refuses to accept that there’s any kind of gap between reality and fantasy. Not even a sliver. And so, in the intervening months, a mystery benefactor (an entrepreneur who had made enough money to be able to afford such things) had been found to help share the not inconsiderable costs of renting the ‘club’. And now Rob was on his way to the estate agent’s to pick up the keys to the flat, situated next to a Chinese restaurant and now apparently tiptoeing the line between comedy and racism with its new name ‘Mr Rong’s’.

Finally, London had a permanent venue for Internet entrepreneurs, and I had access to a hot tub and all the rum I could drink. How could that not improve my productivity? I reasoned. After all, it was a damn sight cheaper than Adam Street – and I’d be going there for Work.

Yeah, right.

No good could come of this.

Absolutely none whatsoever.

6.5

The first big event to be held at Mr Rong’s was a networking event organised by Robert, entrepreneur Oli Barrett and Michael Smith, who had got himself into the event organisation game with a regular Schmooze-fest called ‘Second Chance Tuesday’. The name was a backhanded tribute to ‘First Tuesday’, a successful networking event held during the first dot com boom, which eventually became a poster child for everything that was ridiculous about the investment bubble. First Tuesday was also the event where Michael Smith and Tom Boardman raised the money for Firebox, so when Michael and his friend Judith Clegg, a successful business consultant, decided to start a similar event for the second dot com boom, Second Chance Tuesday was the perfect name.

Being the first ‘Rong’s’ event, the party promised to be a hell of a night. The sort of night that, had Caligula been hosting a networking event downstairs, he’d have probably come up to ask us to keep it down a bit because we were frightening the horses.

Needless to say, I was looking forward to it immensely. And, needless to say, I planned to do very little actual networking there. That could wait. I ‘accidentally’ forgot to tell Savannah that I was going – she might now be my business partner, but she was also an ex-girlfriend and nothing was going to cramp my style that night.

The best thing about Rong ’s – especially given the risk of triads – is how invisible it is from the street, situated at the very top of a nondescript block, between a Chinese restaurant and a nondescript pub on a nondescript street in a nondescript part of Soho. Arriving outside, the only clue that I was at the right place was the dim, persistent thump of bass from a distant stereo and the strange red glow coming from the upstairs windows. To anyone walking past and looking up, it looked a bit like the scene in a horror film when the evil scientist plugs his monster into the lightning conductor machine for the first time.

It ’s aliiiiivvve.

Confirmation that I’d got the right place came as I rang the doorbell and a champagne flute whistled past my ear, shattering into a thousand pieces next to my feet. ‘Sorry, ‘ came a voice from somewhere very high up.

Yep, this must be the place.

A terrifying lift ride to the top of the building – the car had barely enough room for a single person and rattled alarmingly – and with the dull thumping getting louder with each floor, I was in.

The first thing that struck me about Mr Rong’s was how bright everything was – bright yellow walls, neon tubes everywhere, spelling out various feel-good slogans like ‘You have nothing to fear but fear itself’- and also how vast the place was. Split on to three levels, the main downstairs space comprised a dance floor with an enormous wall-sized cinema screen. Then there was the bar, with its giant illuminated lettering spelling out the word ‘Now’, for reasons that were not entirely clear. And in the corner, next to the bathroom, was the first hot tub. But tonight, while still undoubtedly a tub, it wasn’t at all hot. Because it was filled to the brim with ice and magnums of champagne.

I wandered over to the table on the far wall, where rows of name badges sat waiting to be claimed. Looking through the names, one thing was clear: all the big names on the London dot com scene were going to be in attendance, including – and here was the best bit for me – several of the A-list of venture capital investors. Getting to them over coffee was hard, but now they were in my domain; surely if there was any environment in which they’d have their guard down and agree to have a meeting with us about Fridaycities, it would be in Mr Rong’s after drinking a bathful of champagne.

Unfortunately, any hope I had of schmoozing a venture capitalist was dashed the moment I climbed the stairs to the second level – the outdoor deck where the main party was going on. I swear to God, you have never, ever, seen a space so crowded in your life. We’re talking Black-Hole-of-Calcutta-with-Added-Neon crowded. If anyone had so much as coughed too fiercely someone could easily have fallen to their death. That explained the champagne flute. Word had clearly got round; possibly about the networking opportunities, probably about the champagne, certainly about the hot tub.

As if to cement the club’s status as the Mecca for the reborn London dot com scene, Channel 4 had sent along a film crew to cover the event and there were reporters from Business Week and the FT in attendance, too. The FT journalist would later rave about the party, describing Robert as ‘the Hugh Hefner of London’.

Skulking back downstairs I spotted Michael, who for some reason looked a lot like a Roman emperor, perched as he was on a big plastic throne-like chair surrounded by unfeasibly attractive women hanging on his every word. ‘Michael!’ I shouted, to no response.

‘Michael!’

Nothing. I was just about to throw something at him when I noticed he was posing for a photographer. ‘What’s the photo for?’ I asked someone standing in the background.

‘It’s for Business Week magazine – they’re doing a feature on the “swinging” London business scene and they’ve decided that that guy is going to be the focus.’

Michael, the jammy bastard, had been instructed by the photographer to pose with a gaggle of incredibly hot women, to demonstrate… actually, who cares what? Jammy bastard. Suddenly one of the hot women turned around: ‘Paul!’

Fucking hell. It was my Maggie, my ex-girlfriend. And there she was, a fawning extra in Michael’s photo shoot. Was there nothing the man wouldn’t steal from me?

I decided to try to track down the Channel 4 News reporter who was apparently interviewing people on one of the other floors. Anything Michael could do, I could do better. If he was going to be in Business Week, I was going to get myself on to Channel 4 News .

Grabbing a glass of champagne, I headed for the bright spot-lit corner and the gaggle of entrepreneurs all hoping for their moment on camera. Barging past Simon Woodroffe, Yo! Sushi founder-turned Dragons’ Den -star-turned-hotel entrepreneur, I forced my way towards the front of the crowd.

And that’s when I saw him. The brand new technology correspondent of Channel 4 News . The king of the made-up valuation. The former porn entrepreneur.

Benjamin

bloody

Cohen.

Somewhere in the background, over the cacophony of party noise, I swear I could hear Michael and my ex-girlfriend sharing a joke.

6.6

The party was still in full swing, and the hot tub on the top floor was just starting to heat up, but being surrounded by quite so much success in one room was making me giddy. I felt like a total fraud; wasn’t I still just a publisher posing as a dot com entrepreneur? With only my parents’ money in the bank and my friends as my only partners? How could I even show my face at these networking events when I still had so much work to do?

I headed back to the lift and descended into the streets of Soho. As I took the night bus back to my flat I knew it was time for me to up my game in a big way.

What I needed was a proper way in; someone on the inside of the industry who believed in Fridaycities and who would add an air of legitimacy to our whole operation. Someone – not just a blood relative or a friend I’d known for years – who would put his or her money where my mouth was, proving to the world that this was for real. Otherwise wasn’t I just a latter-day Benjamin Cohen – five years after the event – someone whose only success came from telling people he was successful?
I needed an angel.

Chapter Seven: ‘There must be an angel’…